The first enclosure that I noticed was the LC18. This case has a built-in seven inch LCD on the bezel. The newest addition to the Lascala series of enclosures the LC18 has a full aluminum bezel and chassis and fits either an ATX or micro ATX motherboard. It has six internal 3.5″ bays and can fit seven expansion slots.

“ The MediaREADY™ 5000 combines a suite of popular TV-centric applications for digital media management and communication with an advanced electronic program guide and the ability to record broadcast media on either the unit’s internal hard drive or DVD recorder.

The MediaREADY™ 5000 lets users customize viewing by recording shows on a built-in computer hard drive or DVD recorder. Users can access digital media files on the unit’s internal drive, any PC or on the same in-home network, connected peripheral devices. In addition, the unit brings On-demand content, E-mail, Internet browser, Games, and MP3/CD/DVD/MPEG-1/MPEG-2/MPEG-4 playback to any connected television.“

I’ve been anxiously awaiting SageTV 3.0’s prebuilt linux systems, but if the MediaReady 5000 is available soon…. I’m gonna have to increase the byopvr review budget by a LOT! 🙂

I was doing my rounds of all the open source/free pvr software and found that Media Portal will be posting a pre-release version of their upcoming 0.1.3.0 update. Also on their page they have posted a howto on writing your own plugins for Media Portal. If youre interested in writing something for it, and you’re on the Windows platform, go check it out.

“While the Broadcast Flag battle continues, it’s still legal to put together your own home-theater PC. Matthew Gast has begun constructing his system and covers hardware in this first installment of the series:” Building My MythTV Box, Part 1: Hardware

Found a little HTPC case roundup over at Tom’s Hardware Guide. The roundup is comprised of the Hiper Media Center, Ahanix D-Vine5 Media Center, NMedia HTPC 100 Media Center PC Chassis, NMedia HTPC 100 Media Center PC Barebone, Silverstone LC-10M Silver, and a SilverStone LC-11M. If any of you are looking at which case would suit you best, this might help point you in the right direction.

Upon removing the case, my earlier praise of the designers over at Silverstone is justified yet again. To keep coming up with new designs is not hard but to keep doing it excellently is. Especially when you set such a high standard yourself to keep up with, it can be hard but they seem to do it all the time.

It’s reviews like these that make me wish I could afford picking one of these up. The VFD display would be really cool to play with, and it looks like under Windows XP it is rather easy to use with the bundled software.

By 6 p.m. on Tuesday (June 23, 2005), the 27 members of the Senate Appropriations Committee received *more than 11,000 emails and faxes* from EFF supporters. That’s nearly 500 faxes an hour. Dianne Feinstein alone received more than 2,600 messages in her inbox. Kay Hutchison, the senior senator for Texas, received 1,441 letters.
(You can read the full release here.)